We Have Better Things to Do, Right?

For whatever reason this past Friday night – the television in our bedroom was turned onto Big Brother After Hours. I guess this is all the “excitement” you miss in the edited 1-hour versions on television. Like all reality television – one stops to view it like a passing car accident. Or in my case, half listen to it because I was folding laundry.

Basically, a girl and guy housemate was on the couch and she was squealing. She was saying something about, “Well, don’t get it all over me!” Her protests were loud enough that I turned to see what was going on. I was shown the female housemate holding up a pillow and blocking her face. Why? Because the male roommate was laying on the couch gleeking at her.

All I could think was: This didn’t get on T.V. on its own…PEOPLE asked for this!

I spent 30-seconds too long looking at the screen and I will never get those seconds back. And then I stayed on, hoping I was wrong about humanity. But no, they moved on from gleeking to counting the bar patterns in the carpet. At that point, I decided to go wash my hair.

My problem with this kind of programming is twofold. First, as a people, we seem to be settling on the equivalent of watching an aquarium and calling it entertainment. Second, and most importantly, we’ve reduced ourselves to the status of a voyeur.

And on that latter topic…we’re not even COOL voyeurs! We’re BORING and EASILY AMUSED voyeurs! We’ll watch anything. At least a Peeping Tom got something provocative out of his sneaking around. We get gleeking! All we have to show for our viewing hunger is YouTube clips of people doing just about anything to become famous. From video diaries of to juvenile pranks like setting off firecrackers near a sleeping friend – we are supposedly drawn to this stuff because it’s about “real people.”

Oh…if that were true it’d probably make the whole Big Brother After Hours thing less bothersome to me!

It all seemed so innocent when it started, didn’t it? Seven strangers got together just to live with each other on an experiment called The Real World in 1992. Sunday nights at my family’s house was filled with child blooper, crotch hitting fun starting in 1989 with America’s Funniest Home Videos. Every week, ordinary people were encouraged to mine their family video moments for the funny things we do in the hopes of winning the $100,000 Grand Prize.

And yes, that’s exactly who all those people were: Real, everyday people just like you and me. Somewhere along the way though – they became “characters” instead of “themselves.” How many times have you watched a reality show lately and categorized the participants as one or more of the following: The Gay One, The Bitch, The Ethnic One, The Innocent, The Good Guy, or The Jerk?

What you’ve just done is commonly known as “casting.” And with the addition of “casting,” you can certainly subtract out the “reality” from the show.

Have we seriously nothing else better to do in our own lives that we have to watch OTHER people live and debase themselves for cash or fame? It seems so hard to draw the line. A funny moment is a funny moment – but at one point do you become a mindless watcher or someone else’s recorded history?

That’s what bothers me the most. By doing something as innocent as watching Big Brother After Hours, we’re feeding into the mentality that you can make a difference in the world by making an ass out of yourself. Or worse off, we watch these clips and shows because we don’t like who we are and long to be someone else. How else to explain our fascination with people like Tila Tequila, and other self-made social networking/internet stars?

I guess the new escapism is forced reality. How sad for us...

I know that the juggernaut that is YouTube or the continuous production of new reality shows post Writer’s Strike really isn’t going to slow down. But it doesn’t mean that I have to settle with whatever is being fed to you. I can only hope that, much like the sweeping revolution of the internet freedom, there comes another revolution of finding ourselves and taking advantage of the technology and programming we have for good.

The sooner we stop feeding the machine – the sooner Big Brother After Hours gets off my damn T.V. set! Gleeking was gross last Friday as it was in 7th grade!